Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Chinese Discourse and Interaction

Theory and Practice

Yuling Pan [+–]

U.S. Census Bureau

Yuling Pan is Sociolinguist and Principal Researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. Her numerous publications include Politeness in Chinese Face-to-face Interaction (Ablex, 2000), Professional Communication in International Settings (with Suzanne Scollon and Ron Scollon, Blackwell Publishing, 2002) and Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese (with Dániel Z. Kádár, Continuum, 2011).

Dániel Z. Kádár [+–]

Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Daniel Z. Kadar (D.Litt, FHEA, PhD) is Research Professor of Pragmatics and Head of Research Group at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also Yunshan Chair Professor at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. He has been author and editor of more than 20 books, published by academic publishers of world-leading standing such as Equinox, Cambridge, Palgrave and Bloomsbury. He has also published a large number of studies in high-impact journals such as Journal of Politeness Research and Journal of Pragmatics. His most recent works include Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction (Cambridge, 2017), The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Politeness (edited with Jonathan Culpeper and Michael Haugh, Palgrave, 2017), and Understanding Politeness (with Michael Haugh, Cambridge, 2013). He is Editor (with Xinren Chen) of Equinox’s East Asian Pragmatics journal.

Although Chinese is one of the most thoroughly studied languages in pragmatics, and has a pivotal role in intercultural communication studies because of the increasing cultural and economic interaction between China and other countries, no large-scale study has been devoted to this topic. This groundbreaking volume ﬁlls this gap in pragmatic and discourse studies through high-quality research focusing on the theory and practice of Chinese discourse and, in a wider sense, interaction analysis. It introduces the different layers of Chinese discourse and interaction, and makes a valuable contribution not only to Chinese studies but also to other ﬁelds such as intercultural and discourse studies.

The contributors to this volume include renowned experts within the ﬁeld. They present their arguments in an accessible style, making this book useful to both experts of Chinese and discourse studies, as well as advanced students with an interest in communication and society.

Table of Contents

Yuling Pan is Sociolinguist and Principal Researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. Her numerous publications include Politeness in Chinese Face-to-face Interaction (Ablex, 2000), Professional Communication in International Settings (with Suzanne Scollon and Ron Scollon, Blackwell Publishing, 2002) and Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese (with Dániel Z. Kádár, Continuum, 2011).

Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Daniel Z. Kadar (D.Litt, FHEA, PhD) is Research Professor of Pragmatics and Head of Research Group at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also Yunshan Chair Professor at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. He has been author and editor of more than 20 books, published by academic publishers of world-leading standing such as Equinox, Cambridge, Palgrave and Bloomsbury. He has also published a large number of studies in high-impact journals such as Journal of Politeness Research and Journal of Pragmatics. His most recent works include Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction (Cambridge, 2017), The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Politeness (edited with Jonathan Culpeper and Michael Haugh, Palgrave, 2017), and Understanding Politeness (with Michael Haugh, Cambridge, 2013). He is Editor (with Xinren Chen) of Equinox’s East Asian Pragmatics journal.

This edited volume has two closely related goals: first, to contribute to the field of discourse and interaction, and secondly, to fill a knowledge gap in Chinese discourse studies by providing a series of empirical research on Chinese language use in various social contexts.It should be noted that the present work fills an important knowledge gap in the field. Although many studies have been published, which describe certain aspects of Chinese discourse, no work to date has attempted to describe Chinese discourse and interaction in a wider sense. This is supposedly due to the fact that ‘discourse and interaction’ refers to a complex set of linguistic forms and practices – including both the micro and macro features of situated language use – and so there is not any single analytical methodology that could inquire into them in a comprehensive way. This problem manifests itself in the fact that, while many papers have been published on the various aspects of Chinese discourse,1 few books have been devoted to this topic. Furthermore, volumes addressing Chinese discourse deal with its fairly specialised aspects, such as politeness (Pan 2000) or institutional communication (Sun and Kádár 2008). In other words, no attempt has been made to study Chinese discourse in a comprehensive way. This trend is quite different from sociological inquiries into Chinese discourse (e.g. Dikötter 1992; Li 2008). This volume hopes to fill this gap in linguistic studies by providing a series of contributions, applying a wide array of approaches and methodologies

Tomoko Endo is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, affiliated with the Department of Linguistics in Kyoto University. Her publications include book chapters in Studies of Chinese Linguistics: Functional Approaches (edited by Janet Xing, 2009)and Construction and Meaning (in Japanese, edited byHarumi Sawada,forthcoming).

Endo’s chapter examines the sentential positions and functions of a Chinese expression wo juede 我覺得 (‘I think’) and its relation to the epistemic stance that speakers take in conversation. By analysing two major interactional features of Chinese communication, namely, the ways in which the Chinese express personal views and in which they take epistemic stances in interaction, Endo demonstrates how Chinese speakers modulate social relation with their interlocutors by alternating the positions of wo juede 我覺得 (‘I think’) in conversation.

In spontaneous talk-in-interaction, participants often need to attend to recurrent problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. Such recurrent problems are studied under the rubric of ‘repair’ (Schegloff et al. 1977).The study reported here focuses on a forward-oriented repair practice taking place around the linking particle (LP) between a modifier and the head noun in a noun phrase with a [modifier + LP + noun] construction.

Cher Leng Lee is Associate Professor of Chinese Linguistics at the National University of Singapore. Her research areas are: politeness, compliments, Chinese pronouns, Singapore Mandarin and dialects, and Singapore Chinese education. Her publications include: ‘Compliments and Compliment Responses of Singapore Chinese University Students’, Global Chinese 1(1), 169–202; ‘The Deixis of First Person Pronouns in the Analects’, Contemporary Linguistics 16(2), 142–156; ‘Politeness in Singapore’, in Politeness in East Asia (Cambridge University Press 2012); ‘English THEN in Colloquial Singapore Mandarin’, in Chinese Discourse and Interaction (Equinox, 2013); and ‘Compliments and Responses during Chinese New Year Celebrations in Singapore’, Pragmatics, 19(4), 519–541.

This contribution examines the ways in which loan words are used in Chinese interaction through a case study of the interactional application of the English loan-word then in Singaporean Chinese. Lee’s study provides insights into the intercultural aspects of Chinese conversation, and so it forms a ‘bridge’ between micro level and macro-level research, that is, the two parts of the present volume.

First we shall review CDA’s treatment of power in discourse. We then examine analytically the notion of power as defined in terms of mutual dependency relations. This is followed by the introduction of situated discourse, another key concept of this chapter, and the modelling methodology. The power-exercising behaviours found in the Min Dialect Dictionary Launching Symposium, videotaped data lasting 120 minutes, are modelled as a case study. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of theoretical implications and issues for future research.

This chapter opens by first discussing the data and methodology which are employed in the subsequent analysis of emic face concepts and practices in Taiwanese business interactions. It is suggested that operationalising the distinction between emic concepts and practices requires recourse to different approaches to analysing discourse. This is followed by the analytical section which is divided into two parts. In the first part, transcripts of ethnographic interviews with business people are carefully examined to investigate how native informants of Taiwanese Chinese conceptualise face when doing business, drawing from these informants’ knowledge and experiences in relation to face.An analysis of the interactional achievement of face in an extended audiovisual recording of an authentic business negotiation then provides insight into how face may be strategically threatened in interaction, reflecting an example of what we have termed here emic face practices. This is followed by a brief consideration of the implications of this analysis for the role of theorising face in the analysis of discourse and social phenomena, more generally, and for future research on face in Chinese-speaking societies, in particular.

Yuling Pan is Sociolinguist and Principal Researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. Her numerous publications include Politeness in Chinese Face-to-face Interaction (Ablex, 2000), Professional Communication in International Settings (with Suzanne Scollon and Ron Scollon, Blackwell Publishing, 2002) and Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese (with Dániel Z. Kádár, Continuum, 2011).

The research reported in this chapter is part of an ongoing endeavour initiated by the author to introduce the theoretical notion and analytical tool of discourse analysis to examine Chinese speakers’ linguistic behaviour in survey interviews (Pan 2008; Pan et al. 2010). This chapter starts with a discussion of the theoretical framework that guides the development of a coding scheme for question-answer sequences in interviews. It argues for the need to systematically define and measure indirectness. The subsequent section (Data and method) describes the interview data and methodology for coding question types and response patterns. This methodology section is followed by the analytical section (Findings and discussion), which is divided into two parts: summary of findings and discussion. The analysis in this section focuses on two question types that elicit the most indirect responses and expounds the functions of indirect responses, followed by a discussion. The chapter concludes with a proposal for further study of this topic.

The primary objective of this study was to measure the communication style of a large sample of Chinese speakers so that the findings will be generalisable. The analysis focused on their responses to a personal opinion type question and expanded the scope of Pan’s study (Pan, this volume) with a full set of Chinese and English cognitive interview data. By applying the new coding and measurement tool, this study compared the communication style of Chinese respondents to that of English-speaking respondents and performed statistical tests on any observed differences between the two sample groups. The second objective was to examine the internal validity of the survey question by analysing the contextual cues, provided by the respondents during the entire interview, that either support or contradict their face value response to the opinion question. This enables the coders to determine the meaning behind the response. A final objective was to explore the social and demographic factors associated with the communication styles of Chinese respondents to predict the scope of the phenomenon observed.

Approaching discourse analysis from a diachronic perspective, the research described in this chapter examines Chinese telephone interactions between customer callers and employee recipients. Built on the author’s previous research (Sun 1998, 2004, 2008), the current study compares data obtained recently with a comparable set collected over a decade ago, aiming to identify and characterise shifts and changes in business employees’ discourse as observed recently in customer-employee telephone discourse interactions in mainland China. This situated discourse analysis contributes to the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and cross-cultural studies in that it provides an up-to-date, detailed account of Chinese discourse interactions based on customer-employee telephone interactions.

My main research interests are professional and medical communication. I am particularly interested in leadership, and the crucial role that communication plays in leadership performance. I have researched and published widely on various aspects of leadership discourse, gender, the multiple functions and strategic uses of humour, politeness and impoliteness, identity construction, the role of culture, decision making and advice giving, and other aspects of workplace discourse in a range of professional and medical contexts.

I arrived in Hong Kong in December 2003 after completing my PhD studies in St. Petersburg, Russia, and have researched and taught in this vibrant city ever since. My areas of expertise and research interests broadly include interactional approaches to professional communication, in particular in healthcare and business settings. In the past few years I have been working on a number of research projects studying social interactions in the genetic counselling and prenatal screening contexts in Hong Kong in collaboration with public hospitals and the Clinical Genetic Services of Hong Kong. I have also been studying business interactions in a number of large international corporations and privately-owned businesses.Currently I lead the Health Communication Research Cluster at the Center for the Humanities and Medicine, HKU where I also serve as a Board Member; and I am a member of the Consortium on Clinical Genetics and Genomic Medicine (Hong Kong West Cluster (HKWC)/HKU) that strives to improve genetic and genomic services in Hong Kong. Besides work, I also love spending time with my two sons and enjoy trail running around Asia.

In this chapter we take a discourse analytic perspective and examine the Chinese institutional discourse of prenatal genetic counselling (henceforth, PGC) in Hong Kong. We focus on the interactions between Chinese healthcare providers and patients1 and examine how the notion of nondirectiveness, which has historically been adopted as the guiding principle in the genetic counselling profession, is challenged in this sociocultural context. Our interest in the Hong Kong context is twofold: first, the genetic counselling profession is still establishing itself in the region (Lam 2006); therefore the tenets guiding the profession are also being established and negotiated by the professionals. In addition, compared to other countries (e.g. the US and the UK), there are very few discourse and conversation analytic studies of genetic counselling in Hong Kong (Zayts and Kang 2009, 2010; Zayts and Schnurr 2011). This chapter contributes to this emerging body of research by examining Chinese interactional data.

This study investigates discourse and interaction in a broad scope: online public discourse. The challenge of studying public discourse of this nature is that there are two types of competing audience in such interactions. One is the immediate audience such as news reporters in this study. The other is the assumed audience of the wider world. This study shows the tension between the immediate audience (reporters) and the assumed audience (wide public audience) and the ways in which tension is manifested in the response pattern.

Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Daniel Z. Kadar (D.Litt, FHEA, PhD) is Research Professor of Pragmatics and Head of Research Group at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also Yunshan Chair Professor at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. He has been author and editor of more than 20 books, published by academic publishers of world-leading standing such as Equinox, Cambridge, Palgrave and Bloomsbury. He has also published a large number of studies in high-impact journals such as Journal of Politeness Research and Journal of Pragmatics. His most recent works include Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction (Cambridge, 2017), The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Politeness (edited with Jonathan Culpeper and Michael Haugh, Palgrave, 2017), and Understanding Politeness (with Michael Haugh, Cambridge, 2013). He is Editor (with Xinren Chen) of Equinox’s East Asian Pragmatics journal.

The aim of this study is to explore the discursive ways in which group identity was formed in a historical Chinese Community of Practice (Wenger 1998).From a theoretical perspective, this is a pilot study in the sense that it connects current socio-pragmatic theories with the research of Chinese data, instead of treating identity formation in a traditional, sinological way. Along with this theoretical stance, the present chapter contributes also to historical pragmatics due to the fact that in diachronic studies the formation of discursive identity is somewhat neglected. The second part of the analysis in this chapter approaches identity formation discourse from the perspective of politeness research: it devotes special attention to politeness as a “discursive resource” (Thornborrow 2002) in group-identity formation activities. It is argued that along with fulfilling its primary discursive function, politeness can also serve the secondary goal of reinforcing (in-)group relationships

Xinren Chen is Professor of English and Linguistics in the School of Foreign Studies at Nanjing University, P. R. China and is co-editor of East Asian Pragmatics. He has published papers in pragmatics and foreign language teaching in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Modern Foreign Languages and Contemporary Linguistics. The major monographs he authors or co-authors include Contemporary Pragmatics, English Grammar in Use, The Pragmatics of Overinformativeness in Conversation, A Critical Pragmatic Perspective on Public Discourse, Politeness Theories and Foreign Language Learning and Pragmatics and Foreign Language Teaching.

Drawing on data from the vernacular novel Honglou Meng 红楼楼 (A Dream of Red Mansions), also referred to as Shitou Ji 石头记 (The Story of the Stone), a vernacular Chinese novel written in the Qing dynasty, this study examines the ways in which speakers referred to/ addressed themselves in pre-modern Chinese society. Its goal is to contextually analyse the circumstances under which characters in the novel employ the expressions for self-reference and reveal the possible motivations behind their choice, so as to more fully exhibit the complexities of politeness behind the use of Chinese address forms.

Yuling Pan is Sociolinguist and Principal Researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. Her numerous publications include Politeness in Chinese Face-to-face Interaction (Ablex, 2000), Professional Communication in International Settings (with Suzanne Scollon and Ron Scollon, Blackwell Publishing, 2002) and Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese (with Dániel Z. Kádár, Continuum, 2011).

Although Chinese is one of the most thoroughly studied languages in pragmatics, and has a pivotal role in intercultural communication studies because of the increasing cultural and economic interaction between China and other countries, no large-scale study has been devoted to this topic. This groundbreaking volume ﬁlls this gap in pragmatic and discourse studies through high-quality research focusing on the theory and practice of Chinese discourse and, in a wider sense, interaction analysis. It introduces the different layers of Chinese discourse and interaction, and makes a valuable contribution not only to Chinese studies but also to other ﬁelds such as intercultural and discourse studies. The contributors to this volume include renowned experts within the ﬁeld. They present their arguments in an accessible style, making this book useful to both experts of Chinese and discourse studies, as well as advanced students with an interest in communication and society.

Yuling Pan is Sociolinguist and Principal Researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. Her numerous publications include Politeness in Chinese Face-to-face Interaction (Ablex, 2000), Professional Communication in International Settings (with Suzanne Scollon and Ron Scollon, Blackwell Publishing, 2002) and Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese (with Dániel Z. Kádár, Continuum, 2011).

Although Chinese is one of the most thoroughly studied languages in pragmatics, and has a pivotal role in intercultural communication studies because of the increasing cultural and economic interaction between China and other countries, no large-scale study has been devoted to this topic. This groundbreaking volume ﬁlls this gap in pragmatic and discourse studies through high-quality research focusing on the theory and practice of Chinese discourse and, in a wider sense, interaction analysis. It introduces the different layers of Chinese discourse and interaction, and makes a valuable contribution not only to Chinese studies but also to other ﬁelds such as intercultural and discourse studies. The contributors to this volume include renowned experts within the ﬁeld. They present their arguments in an accessible style, making this book useful to both experts of Chinese and discourse studies, as well as advanced students with an interest in communication and society.

ISBN-13 (Hardback)

9781845536329

Price (Hardback)

£75.00 / $99.95

ISBN (eBook)

9781781790229

Price (eBook)

Individual£75.00 / $99.95Institutional£75.00 / $99.85

Publication

01/01/2013

Pages

338

Size

234 x 156mm

Readership

scholars

Reviews

A delight to read and a welcome challenge for any scholar of discourse in Chinese contexts, as well as for researchers in cross-cultural politeness and pragmatics, and students of Chinese communication, more broadly.LinguistList

With empirical studies employing diverse methods, analytic frameworks and data sources, this edited volume successfully fills a knowledge gap in Chinese discourse studies. This volume is recommended for students and scholars working on Chinese discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics and intercultural studies.Language in Society

An illuminating read with a cohesive focus. Surveys an impressive array of approaches and analytic methods in the latest scholarship on Chinese discourse and interaction. Language and Dialogue

The volume makes a worthwhile theoretical and methodological contribution to Chinese discourse research and offers us insights into how to achieve communication successfully and efficiently in some Chinese contexts.Discourse Studies